Peruvians know him as the priest who went ‘from Chicago to Chiclayo.’ He is now Pope Leo XIV

CHICLAYO, Peru (AP) — The people of northern Peru call him el obispo. Sometimes he is also Padre Prevost. Maybe when the shock wears off, they will get used to his new title, Pope Leo XIV.

Waiters, taxi drivers, teachers and others — faithful or otherwise — saw the Rev. Robert Prevost around their communities for 20 years, eating ceviche, singing Christmas songs and partaking in everyday activities. But he also walked through flooded streets to reach the needy and drove to remote villages to hand out blankets. Many sat a few feet away from him while he delivered succinct sermons.

They can all now say they know the pope.

“He’s a very simple man,” said Alejandro Bazalar, whose feet Leo washed during a Holy Week ceremony in the city of Chiclayo, where Leo lived for nine years. “We Chiclayanos never imagined that God’s representative on Earth would live among us.”

Chiclayo, with more than 800,000 people, plays a vital role as the main commercial hub of Peru’s northern Pacific coast, with highways linking it to the Andes mountains and Amazon region. The two-story homes near its main square are painted in shades of cream or white and the narrow streets are jammed at midday. Low-income neighborhoods rise a few miles away.

Leo, 69 and born in the United States, arrived in the city in 2014, serving as administrator and then bishop until his predecessor, Pope Francis, summoned him to Rome in 2023. After he was introduced to the world as Leo XIV, he introduced Chiclayo to the world.

“Greetings … to all of you, and in particular, to my beloved diocese of Chiclayo in Peru, where a faithful people have accompanied their bishop, shared their faith,” he said Thursday in Spanish, standing on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica for his first speech as the leader of the Catholic church.

Ricardo Ulloque on Friday remembered Leo singing into a microphone “I wanna wish you a merry Christmas” – the verse in José Feliciano’s bilingual song “Feliz Navidad” – accompanied by a small band during a youth gathering in 2017.

Waiter Alonso Alarcón recalled the time Leo visited a restaurant and ate ceviche, Peru’s staple dish of lemon-marinated fish. And cab driver Hugo Pérez said he saw the pope several times driving around Chiclayo, 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the coast.

The Rev. Jorge Millán, a priest who lived with Leo and other brothers in Chiclayo, said the new pope had a “mathematical mindset, he was orderly and punctual.” He washed his own dishes, he said, and liked to fix cars, searching YouTube for solutions when he was stumped.

The front pages of Friday’s newspapers in Peru showed the newly elected pope. In the capital, Lima, street vendors were already selling T-shirts with photos and memes of Leo, including one that read “the pope is Peruvian.”

Leo’s time in Chiclayo was the third period he lived in Peru. Ordained in 1982, he was sent to work in a mission in the northern part of the country, near the border with Ecuador, between 1985 and 1986. He returned in 1988 and remained in the region until he returned to the U.S. in 1999.

The Chicago native became a Peruvian citizen in 2015. He would often tell Peruvians that he had “come from Chicago to Chiclayo; the only difference is a few letters.”

Peruvian President Dina Boluarte on Thursday said Leo’s election was a “historic moment” for Peru and the U.S.

“He chose to be one of us, to live among us, and to carry in his heart the faith, culture, and dreams of this nation,” she said in a video message in which she also recalled that Leo chose to become a Peruvian citizen “as an expression of his profound love for Peru.”

Once or twice a month, Millán said, Prevost played tennis at the Jockey Club in Chiclayo, and when Peru qualified for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, he cheered on his adopted country’s victory from a couch with other priests.

In the city of Chulucanas, about 270 kilometers north of Chiclayo, Mildred Camacho, 28, remembers Leo in a more personal way — he is her godfather, she said.

When he left for Rome, Camacho said, the two kept in touch, and he even sent her a photo showing him working with then-Pope Francis.

“When I saw he was elected,” she said, “I ran to my father shouting, ‘Daddy, my godfather has become the pope!’”

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Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.